Encrypting PostgreSQL - Cybertect.at announced PostgreSQL instance level encryption earlier in the month. The solution implement - in a patched PostgreSQL 9.6 - is an encrypting layer between the databases buffers and its disk writes. Of course, that still left the issue of key management to be addressed, which another developer looked at and solved by using HashiCorps Vault.

SQLPad - A new project SQLPad looks interesting - it's a Node.js based web application which acts as a notebook of SQL queries and visualizations that you can fire at a range of SQL databases including PostgreSQL, MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server. More information on the project site.

Developer Bits

Rust 1.13 - The latest Rust release sees the language evolve a ? operator for error handling - a feature which had been tested out as the macro-implemented try! function and now made elegant as part of the language. There's also performance optimizations and security updates to the package manager.

Ruby 2.4 preview3 - Running on track for a Christmas release, the latest preview of Ruby 2.4 has some performance improvements, better thread deadlock reporting and OpenSSL 1.1.0 support. There's also features open for further discussion like better internal hash table handling, the Integer unification of Fixnum and Bignum and Unicode aware String case mappings.

Go is 7 - The Go language just celebrated seven years since the first Go incarnation was open sourced. It's come a long way in seven years, and it has been getting better with each version.

Homebrew 1.1 - A couple of breaking changes mean that Homebrew 1.1 is now out. Our favorite change - running brew as root is now disabled.

Lagom 1.2 - The Lagom microservices framework just hit version 1.2. It gets a mention here because it just added JDBC support for sorting persistent entities and for reads which can sit alongside Cassandra - which has a new read side API too. The new version's headline feature is message broker support, with one Kafka-based implementation supplied with the release.

Wireless Bits

Facebook goes millimeter wireless - It appears that Facebook is trying to push the data rates on millimeter wave wireless technology. In an article they say they've managed to get almost 20Gbps over 13km. The long term plan? To beam mm-wave data at the company's Aquila solar-powered optically-meshed UAVs, each covering an area with connectivity. There's a while to go before they get there, though.

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